Your Running Excuse, Busted!

Looks like it’s time to find another one

The reason you don’t run has been echoed often: you’re worried about your knees and hips. Well, you’re going to have to find a different excuse, says Paul Williams, PhD, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley. His research found that strenuous sports such as running and walking actually strengthen your joints and don’t make hip and knee replacements the price of living an active lifestyle.

Dr. Williams looked at outcomes of these activities that are supposed to have negative impacts: osteoarthritis and hip replacement. “To my surprise, we found, rather than what I expected, that both osteoarthritis and hip replacements went down the more you ran,” he says. Walking had the same effect.

Instead of thinking that by pursuing these activities we are going to wear ourselves out like a car, we should celebrate the nimble nature of the human body. “It tends to put resources in to adapt to the stresses that are being applied to the body,” Williams says. “So it’s not that we are wearing out our joints, rather the body is being stimulated to depositing more and more cartilage in these areas—so it’s a protective effect.”

How did Williams come to this conclusion? He looked at the reports of nearly 75,000 participants in the National Runners’ and Walkers’ Health Studies to see whether osteoarthritis and hip replacement risk increased by running, walking or other exercise that was the same in intensity and whether it increased more for running than walking. Lucky for us, his research published in the July issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, found that none of these things occurred.